Ken Kocienda

* WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER * An insider's account of Apple's creative process during the golden years of Steve Jobs. Hundreds of millions of people use Apple products every day; several thousand work on Apple's campus in Cupertino, California; but only a handful sit at the drawing board. Creative Selection recounts the life of one of the few who worked behind the scenes, a highly-respected software engineer who worked in the final years of the Steve Jobs era—the Golden Age of Apple. Ken Kocienda offers an inside look at Apple’s creative process. For fifteen years, he was on the ground floor of the company as a specialist, directly responsible for experimenting with novel user interface concepts and writing powerful, easy-to-use software for products including the iPhone, the iPad, and the Safari web browser. His stories explain the symbiotic relationship between software and product development for those who have never dreamed of programming a computer, and reveal what it was like to work on the cutting edge of technology at one of the world's most admired companies. Kocienda shares moments of struggle and success, crisis and collaboration, illuminating each with lessons learned over his Apple career. He introduces the essential elements of innovation—inspiration, collaboration, craft, diligence, decisiveness, taste, and empathy—and uses these as a lens through which to understand productive work culture. An insider's tale of creativity and innovation at Apple, Creative Selection shows readers how a small group of people developed an evolutionary design model, and how they used this methodology to make groundbreaking and intuitive software which countless millions use every day.

Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

Creative Selection

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1. Inspiration: Thinking big ideas and imagining what might be possible

2. Collaboration: Working together well with other people and seeking to combine your complementary strengths 

3. Craft: Applying skill to achieve high-quality results and always striving to do better

4. Diligence: Doing the necessary grunt work and never resorting to shortcuts

5. Decisiveness: Making tough choices and refusing to delay or procrastinate 

6. Taste: Developing a refined sense of judgment and finding the balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole

7. Empathy: Trying to see the world from other people's perspectives and creating work that fits into their lives and adapts to their needs

But do these limits always apply in software development? In the large projects Brooks was speaking about, where teams of hundreds or thousands are working against schedules and initiatives with mutual dependencies, the size of the effort bounds the speed of the work, and the overhead of communication and co-ordination swamps the impact of individuals, even the geniuses.

Although Linux and Mac OS X traced a common software lineage extending back to UNIX, an operating system created as a research project at Bell Laboratories in 1969, both had diverged significantly from that shared ancestor. Over time, Linux and Mac had become like two differ- ent countries separated by the same language. Linux said "lorry where the Mac said "truck." 

A significant part of attaining excellence in any field is closing the gap between the accidental and intentional, to achieve not just a something or even an everything but a specific and well-chosen thing, to take words and turn them into a vision, and then use the vision to spur the actions that create the results.

We needed concrete and specific demos to guide our work, since even an unsophisticated idea is hard to discuss constructively without an artifact to illustrate it.

We rarely had brainstorming sessions. I recall only a few times in my entire Apple career when I stood around to rough out big plans at a whiteboard... If brainstorms run longer than an hour or so, or if there are more than a handful of people in at tendance, or if they're a common occurrence, they can devolve into a form of sneaky procrastination. Whiteboard discussions feel like work, but often they’re not, since it’s too difficult to talk productively about ideas in the abstract.

Developing the judgment to avoid this pitfall centers on the refined-like response, evaluating in an active way and finding the self-confidence to form opinions with your gut you can also justify with your head. It's not always easy to come to grips with objects or ideas and think about them until it's possible to express why you like them or not, yet taking part in a healthy and productive creative process requires such reflective engagement.

A properly judged mixture of taste and empathy is the secret formula for making products that are intuitive, easy use, and easy to live with.

Yes, it's true that a team at Google couldn't decide be- tween two blues, so they're testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. […]

At Apple, we never would have dreamed of doing that, and we never staged A/B tests for any of the software on the iPhone. When it came to choosing a color, we picked one. We used our good taste—and our knowledge of how to make software accessible to people with visual difficulties related to color perception—and we moved on.

Creative selection and the seven essential elements were our most important product development ingredients, but it took committed people to breathe life into these concepts and transform them into a culture. The culture we created is inseparable from the products we created. In my experience, this manner of culture formation works best when the groups and teams remain small, when the interpersonal interactions are habitual and rich rather than occasional and fleeting.

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